Many operating systems provide a mechanism for “stitching” (i.e., pipelining) multiple applications (e.g., utilities) together to create a custom, ad hoc command that can be entered on a command line of the operating system. Typically, the commands are used in system administration tools, such as for managing system properties. Each of the “pipelined” utilities in the command communicate with each other by transferring text. Thus, each utility in the pipeline is responsible for parsing text that is received and for formatting text that is output. As one can imagine, if a very sophisticated command is desired, a system administrator must understand several utilities in order to properly pipeline the utilities in a manner that will produce the sophisticated output. Understanding the detailed inner-workings of each utility and correctly pipelining the several utilities is time-consuming and is challenging for system administrators. In fact, few people acquire such detailed knowledge of each of the utilities. Thus, system administration is very specialized. Therefore, there is a need for a mechanism that allows system administrators the ability to create custom, ad hoc, command-line-based administration tools without requiring them to know the detailed workings of each utility that is pipelined.